VOCABULARY FOR WEEK October 25-29

APHORISM:
Etymology:
From the Greek, "to delimit, define"
1. A tersely phrased statement of a truth or opinion.
2. A brief statement of a principle.
Observations:
* "The word aphorism was first employed by Hippocrates to describe a collection of concise principles, primarily medical, beginning with the famous, 'Life is short, art is long, opportunity fleeting, experimentation dangerous, reasoning difficult. . . .' Eventually the term was applied to statements of principles in law and agriculture and extended to other areas."(G. A. Test, Satire: Spirit and Art. Univ. Press of Florida, 1991)
Examples:
* "Sits he on ever so high a throne, a man still sits on his bottom." (Montaigne)
* "All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why."
(James Thurber)
* "The first rule of Fight Club is--you do not talk about Fight Club." (Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden, Fight Club)
* "An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup." (H.L. Mencken)
* "Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise." (Alice Walker)
* "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." (Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night)

HYPOPHORA:
Definition: A rhetorical term for the strategy in which a speaker raises a question and then immediately answers it.
Examples:
* "What makes a king out of a slave? Courage! What makes the flag on the mast to wave? Courage! What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage!" (The Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, 1939)
* "You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalog of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.” (Winston Churchill, 13 May 1940)
* "What shall Cordelia speak?
Love, and be silent." (Cordelia in King Lear by William Shakespeare)
* "You boil it all down, what does a man really need? Just a smoke and a cup of coffee."
(Sterling Hayden as Johnny Guitar in Johnny Guitar, 1954)
* "Ask any mermaid you happen to see, 'What's the best tuna?' Chicken of the Sea."
(television commercial)
* "In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
(Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man, 1949)
* "What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children."
(John F. Kennedy, commencement address at American University, 1963)
* "What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."
(Kurt Vonnegut)

POLYPTOTON
Etymology: From the Greek, "use of the same word in different cases"
Definition: A rhetorical term for repetition of words derived from the same root but with different endings. Adjective: polyptotonic.
Observations:
* "It is sometimes the goal of an argument to take a concept accepted by an audience in one role or category of a sentence action and transfer it to others, an agent becoming an action or an action becoming an attribute and so on. This work is epitomized by polyptoton, the grammatical morphing of the word, as Aristotle explains repeatedly in the Topics. . . . He points out, for example, how people's judgments follow a term as it changes from one part of speech to another. So, for example, an audience who believes that acting justly is better than acting courageously will also believe that justice is better than courage and vice versa . . .. [T]he Topics is not concerned with immutable rules of validity but with the patterns of reasoning that most people follow most of the time, and most people will indeed follow the logic of polyptotonic morphing as Aristotle describes it."
(Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science. Oxford Univ. Press, 1999)
Examples:
* "Choosy Mothers Choose Jif" (commercial slogan for Jif peanut butter)
* ". . . love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove . . ." (Shakespeare, Sonnet 116)
* "Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired." (Robert Frost)
* "By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming idiotic oneself."
(Gustave Flaubert)
* "The things you own end up owning you."
(Brad Pitt in the movie Fight Club, 1999)
* "Morality is moral only when it is voluntary."
(Lincoln Steffens)
* "Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it."
(Joseph Conrad)
* "A good ad should be like a good sermon: it must not only comfort the afflicted; it also must afflict the comfortable."
(Bernice Fitzgibbon)
* "Friendly Americans win American friends."
(slogan of the United States Travel Service in the 1960s)
* "His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars."
(William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, December 1950)
* "Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment."
(Norman Mailer)
* "You can't keep blaming yourself. Blame yourself once, then move on."
(Homer Simpson)

ISOCOLON
Etymology: From the Greek, "of equal members or clauses"
Definition: A rhetorical term for a succession of clauses of approximately equal length and corresponding structure.
Observations:
* "Isocolon is a sequence of sentences of equal length, as in Pope's 'Equal your merits! equal is your din!' (Dunciad II, 244), where each sentence is assigned five syllables, iconizing the concept of equal distribution. . .
Examples:
* "Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get." (Mark Twain)
* "It takes a licking, but it keeps on ticking!" (advertising slogan of Timex watches)
* "An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered." (Gilbert Keith Chesterton)
* "I'm a Pepper, he's a Pepper, she's a Pepper, we're a Pepper--
Wouldn't you like to be a Pepper, too? Dr. Pepper!" (advertising jingle for Dr. Pepper soft drink)

TRICOLON
Etymology: From the Greek, "three" + "unit"
Definition: A series of three parallel words, phrases, or clauses.
Examples:
* "I require three things in a man. He must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid." (Dorothy Parker)
* "You are talking to a man who has laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom, and chuckled at catastrophe." (The Wizard in The Wizard of Oz, 1939)
* "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." (Benjamin Franklin)
* "Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned." (Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Dirge Without Music")
* "Be sincere, be brief, be seated." (Franklin D. Roosevelt's advice to speakers)
* "Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language, we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas." (Eric Bentley, "The Dramatic Event")
* "Eye it, try it, buy it." (Slogan for Chevrolet, 1940s)
* "And the fan takes over again, and the heat and the relaxed air and the memory of so many good little dinners in so many good little illegal places, with the theme of love, the sound of ventilation, the brief medicinal illusion of gin." (E.B. White, "Here Is New York")
* "She loved Maytree, his restlessness, his asceticism, his, especially, abdomen." (Annie Dillard, The Maytrees)
* "Tradition. Innovation. Service." (Slogan of First Chatham Bank)
* "The key to Springfield has always been Elm Street. The Greeks knew it. The Carthaginians knew it. Now you know it." (Herman, "Bart the General," The Simpsons)
* "I think we've all arrived at a very special place. Spiritually, ecumenically, grammatically."
(Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean)